In an interview with Hanny, Julian Assange refutes the claim that Russia masterminded the leak of John Podesta’s emails. Even if Podesta hadn’t swallowed the phishing hook, his email password was “password”:

Podesta gave out that his password was the word ‘password’. His own staff said this email that you’ve received, this is totally legitimate. So, this is something … a 14-year-old kid could have hacked Podesta that way.

It really is unbelievable at some level that Podesta would have such a password, but interestingly it’s often the most powerful who feel the least vulnerable.

I doubt we will ever get to the bottom of where the emails came from. Assange’s credibility will be called into doubt because of his well-known hatred for the Clintons. At the end of the day, I don’t think the emails were as critical as some on the left seem to think they were — that is, I don’t think that black voters in Philly, Detroit and Milwaukee didn’t come out in the numbers they did for Obama (which is what determined the election) had anything at all to do with the emails. Trump won about the same percentage of whites as Romney did, so it seems doubtful it was impactful there, either. What happened was she was a bad candidate who ran a campaign suited to a different candidate (Obama). The emails are a distraction, always were a distraction, and really we’ll likely never really know what happened in terms of the sourcing and acquisition of them.

There was no Russian operation to “hack the election”. That’s BS. But Podesta was phished by some entity which shows elaborate signs of being in the business of gathering intelligence that the Russian government is interested in. I think the guess is it’s independent guys who sell them stuff.

RU government involvement is pretty plausible. Maybe it’s all an elaborate false flag. I suspect the Russians had no plans, then realized try had stuff they could throw into the pot to cause trouble, and did so. They may.be laughing themselves sick over the hysterical Democrat reaction. I don’t like them laughing at us but in life, sometimes the joke is on you.

I don’t think it influenced the election. I’m glad we shone a little light on the dirty insides of the DNC and the HRC campaign.

We bugged Merkel. We bug everybody. It’s not nice but nations gather intelligence on each other. It’s not an act of war.

I’d hardly call Assange’s statements on this “refuting”. The twitter analysis thread on this is worth reading: https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/816621553643294720 In short, Podesta may have had a terrible password, but the audit trail behind whoever hacked him points to some amount of sophistication. Russia? Maybe. Bored teenager? Probably not.

I said something similar after the Ashley Madison hack. Modern technology makes it more difficult, murkier, not easier, to confirm responsibility for electronic activities, because hardly anyone really knows how these technologies work or what is truly possible.

Even if Podesta hadn’t swallowed the phishing hook, his email password was “password”:

I’m not one to advocate the creation of new laws, and as a cybersecurity professional I admit to being biased. But for Heavens’ sake, there really ought to be a law prohibiting anybody truly stupid and careless enough to do this from getting within 500 yards of any form of cybertechnology – for their own safety, if for no other reason.

There was no Russian operation to “hack the election”. That’s BS. But Podesta was phished by some entity which shows elaborate signs of being in the business of gathering intelligence that the Russian government is interested in. I think the guess is it’s independent guys who sell them stuff.

Interesting info at the link. However, at best this speculates who the spearphisher was. But given such an absurdly easy password to guess, to point at Russia as associated with the leak wouldn’t you also have to assume no one else walked into that wide open door and made their own copies? Perhaps the timeline would help here, especially if the spearphishing incident involved Podesta selecting a new and more secure password? If Podesta changed his password from “password” to “password1”, or “123456”, for example, his gmail account would still be wide open to anyone who was interested and knew his email address. Given the fact that he didn’t realize he had been phished, and given what we know about his prior gmail password, this would seem like the odds on bet. The only thing that would surprise me based on what we know is if the spearphishers were the only ones reading all of Podesta’s mail.

A password that simple WILL be guessed immediately by any of hundreds of 24-7 IP/site hackbots around the world-I once had a co-worker who used ‘password’ as the password for a new server and it was compromised by an offsite bot within the HOUR.

Those minor changes like changing ‘a’ to ‘@’ are MOST CERTAINLY on the list of ‘most common passwords to try’, the notion that any one individual or country can be held evidentially responsible is both risible and openly dishonest.

While I doubt the Russians did it, I guess it’s possible. Nonetheless, unless he’s absolutely certain, I think it’s a mistake for Trump to argue so much about who did it, since the critical voters in swing states were not likely paying any attention to that stuff. It’s not like Hillary was on the email chains. Just a bunch of internal DNC catty politics. Even Obama said they weren’t very interesting (while in the next breath claiming that they swayed the election).

By arguing about who did it, it feels as though Trump is giving legitimacy to the claim that those emails swayed the election. That said, he’s much more politically savvy than I am.

” But for Heavens’ sake, there really ought to be a law prohibiting anybody truly stupid and careless enough to do this from getting within 500 yards of any form of cybertechnology…”

Nah, this is a feature not a bug. The very last thing I want is society to require our leaders to hide the evidence better. As it is, being elected to public office should be sufficient evidence for an all-access search warrant for bribery, blackmail, racketeering, sex trafficking, homicide, drug possession and treason.

I have to regularly rotate passwords and ATM cards just to keep Dindus from riding Uber on my dime. What an insulated life these Elites live if they’re this casual with security.

…

@Dystopia Max,

Yep, easy ones die fast. The university I attended had a sysadmin who cracked students’ passwords for a hobby. He broke one of my lazier ones, the name of a favorite author followed by the number of letters in the author’s name, and e-mailed it to me in triumph.

John Podesta isn’t stupid. he’s arrogant, an arrogance borne of occultic practices constantly telling him he’s awesome and has power (“Spirit Cooking”). He also would have a massive bullseye painted on him due to these very same practices, as evidenced by Anthony Weiner’s “Life Insurance” laptop folder.

“The wicked run though none pursueth, but the righteous are as bold as lions”.
Proverbs 28:1

And no, there was no Russian election hack. Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to do that. Our class of selfish politicians, puppets of the elites exactly like (satanic) Hillary, can destroy the West without his help, and he knows it.

But he won a substantially different segment of whites, which means he lost as many regular R voters as he gained in other whites who don’t usually vote R. Among those Rs he lost, my sense is the e-mails/Clinton Foundation stuff depressed the number who would have otherwise gone all the way over to voting for Hillary. Many influencers still went all the way, but they weren’t able to bring along many of those they typically influence.

I’ve had my differences (huge differences) with Greenwald, and I don’t like Assange at all, but this article offers an excellent breakdown of the anatomy of a fake news report (using partial information and then taking it out of context to lead the reader to come to an inaccurate conclusion).

“BUT, LIKE SO much online fake news, this was a fraud that had a huge impact, as The Guardian and Jacobs surely knew would happen. It’s difficult to quantify exactly how many people consumed these false claims, but it was definitely in the tens of thousands and almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. Here’s just one tweet, by the Washington Post’s Clinton-supporting blogger (and Tufts political science professor) Dan Drezner, that spread the claim about Assange’s purported belief that Russia is too open to need whistleblowing; as of today, it has been re-tweeted by more than 7,000 people and “liked” by another 7,000:
(snip)
Nothing illustrates the damage done by online journalistic deceit better than this: While Drezner’s spreading of Jacobs’s false claim was re-tweeted thousands and thousands of times, the objection from the actual reporter, Maurizi, pointing out that it was false, was almost completely ignored. At the time this article was published, it had a grand total of 14 re-tweets.

(snip)
THE PEOPLE WHO should be most upset by this deceit are exactly the ones who played the leading role in spreading it: namely, those who most vocally claim that Fake News is a serious menace. Nothing will discredit that cause faster or more effectively than the perception that this crusade is really about a selective desire to suppress news that undermines one’s political agenda, masquerading as concern for journalistic accuracy and integrity. Yet, as I’ve repeatedly documented, the very same people most vocal about the need to suppress Fake News are often those most eager to disseminate it when doing so advances their agenda.